In today's world, cellular networks provide on-demand communications capabilities to individuals and business entities. Typically, a cellular network is wireless network that can be distributed over land areas, which are called cells. Each such cell is served by at least one fixed-location transceiver, which is referred to as a cell site or a base station. Each cell can use a different set of frequencies than its neighbor cells in order to avoid interference and provide guaranteed bandwidth within each cell. When cells are joined together, they provide radio coverage over a wide geographic area, which enables a large number of mobile telephones, and/or other wireless devices or portable transceivers to communicate with each other and with fixed transceivers and telephones anywhere in the network. Such communications are performed through base stations and are accomplished even if when mobile transceivers are moving through more than one cell during transmission. Major wireless communications providers have deployed such cell sites throughout the world, thereby allowing communications mobile phones and mobile computing devices to be connected to the public switched telephone network and public Internet.
A mobile telephone is a portable telephone that is capable of receiving and/or making telephone and/or data calls through a cell site or a transmitting tower by using radio waves to transfer signals to and from the mobile telephone. In view of a large number of mobile telephone users, current mobile telephone networks provide a limited and shared resource. In that regard, cell sites and handsets can change frequency and use low power transmitters to allow simultaneous usage of the networks by many callers with less interference. Coverage by a cell site can depend on a particular geographical location and/or a number of users that can potentially use the network. For example, in a city, a cell site can have a range of up to approximately ½ mile; in rural areas, the range can be as much as 5 miles; and in some areas, a user can receive signals from a cell site 25 miles away.
The following are examples of some of the digital cellular technologies that are in use by the communications providers: Global System for Mobile Communications (“GSM”), General Packet Radio Service (“GPRS”), cdmaOne, CDMA2000, Evolution-Data Optimized (“EV-DO”), Enhanced Data Rates for GSM Evolution (“EDGE”), Universal Mobile Telecommunications System (“UMTS”), Digital Enhanced Cordless Telecommunications (“DECT”), Digital AMPS (“IS-136/TDMA”), and Integrated Digital Enhanced Network (“iDEN”). The Long Term Evolution, or 4G LTE, which was developed by the Third Generation Partnership Project (“3GPP”) standards body, is a standard for a wireless communication of high-speed data for mobile phones and data terminals. LTE is based on the GSM/EDGE and UMTS/HSPA digital cellular technologies and allows for increasing capacity and speed by using a different radio interface together with core network improvements.
Communications between users in existing digital cellular networks are typically defined and/or affected by various factors and/or parameters. These can include latency. Latency can be measured as either one-way (the time from the source sending a packet to the destination receiving it), or a round-trip delay time (the one-way latency from source to destination plus the one-way latency from the destination back to the source). While the existing LTE systems were designed to increase speed of communications by reducing significant latency that plagued its predecessors, such systems are still affected by a substantial amount of latency when mobile users setup communications via the LTE systems. Further, the current LTE systems involve components that are costly and expensive to install and maintain.
A variety of vendors is available for users to choose from for provision of wireless services. To provide effective communication for the users, carrier aggregation can be implemented in the wireless networks. Using carrier aggregation, it is possible to simultaneously schedule a user on multiple component carriers for downlink or uplink data transmission. However, such simultaneous scheduling can result in scheduling and load balancing problems across network. Additionally, in various networks, carriers can belong to different frequency bands, which can result in significant differences in coverage between carriers. Further, at different locations in the network, some users can be scheduled on only a few select carriers while others can have access to an entire set of carriers. Thus, there is a need to provide a better inter-site carrier aggregation in order to allow for effective scheduling of users, reduction of latency, improved connectivity and quality of service.